Word: tchitcherine
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Back in Moscow, able Max became assistant to the great George Tchitcherin, a former noble and Tsarist diplomat!' who was Soviet Foreign Commissar from 1920 onward for ten years, gradually growing sicker, turning over more & more of his cares to Max, who became Foreign Commissar last year...
Twenty hours a day was the usual stint of Tchitcherin. Often he worked without sleep clear around the clock. In those days the Soviet Foreign Office was full of peasants and proletarians, learning to be diplomats. Tchitcherin had to do almost everything himself, and correct what others did. Under the terrible pressure of conducting single-handed the foreign affairs of Europe's largest nation. Tchitcherin burned himself out with detail, reached the point where he sharpened his own pencils...
That way (for an executive) madness lies. Tchitcherin did not go mad but is a weak, sick man today. The bearman learned from Tchitcherin, does not sharpen his own pencils. Tchitcherin would not use an automobile or permit his suits to be pressed, aristocrat that he was. Max, no aristocrat, can and does dress neatly without fear of Soviet gossip. He and Mme Litvinov give Moscow's best, biggest official parties. It is their duty. He must put on long black tails, she a filmy evening dress, and they must dine off gold plate at the Foreign Office...
Almost a decade ago the Chicago Tribune, self-styled "World's Greatest Newspaper," ordered its correspondent in Moscow to present the following ultimatum to Soviet Foreign Minister Georg Tchitcherin: "You must abandon your censorship and guarantee freedom of expression, otherwise our correspondent will be withdrawn and so will the correspondents of other American newspapers, so that Russia will find herself without means of communication with the outer world." The rage into which Comrade Tchitcherin flew when he read these words was towering, to say the least. "The newspaper speaks to me," he stormed, "as if it were a government...
Since the Prime Minister of Rumania, bearded, bulking, bowed Vintila Bratiano, mortally hates but does not fear the Soviet Power, he ignored Tchitcherin's protest...